The Illustrated Letters of Jane Austen E-Book

Penelope Hughes-Hallett

• Herausgeber: Batsford
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Serie: Illustrated Letters
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 250

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

A beautifully illustrated account of the letters and correspondence of Jane Austen. It has been said that Jane Austen the woman and Jane Austen the author are all of a piece, and nowhere is this more evident to the lovers of her novels than in the pages of her letters. This handsome celebration of Austen's letters is illustrated with portraits, facsimile letters, topographical engravings and fashion plates, all helping to bring to life the world Jane Austen inhabited. The letters, with an accompanying commentary by Penelope Hughes-Hallett, are separated into six periods of Jane Austen's life, between the years 1796, when she was twenty, and 1817, the year of her death. They celebrate Jane Austen's talent for expressing exactly what she perceived, making this an illuminating companion to her novels. Although the book follows a broadly chronological scheme, the letters are arranged round visual themes, including the Hampshire countryside, social life in Bath and London, domestic pursuits, paying visits and travelling by carriage. The author, who was born in Jane Austen's Hampshire village of Steventon, lectured on English Literature for the Open University and the Oxford University Department of External Studies. 

Leseprobe

Wild flowers design for silk material, c.1790 (w/c on paper), - Kilburn, William (1745-1818) / Bridgeman Images.

Sydney Gardens, from John Claude Nattes’ Bath The gardens were a centre of much gaiety: concerts, fireworks and galas. ‘There is a public breakfast in Sydney Gardens every morning, so that we shall not be wholly starved,’ wrote Jane.

The silhouette found pasted into the second edition of Mansfield Park and inscribed l’aimable Jane.

CONTENTS

THE LETTERS OF JANE AUSTEN

INTRODUCTION

STEVENTON 1796–1801

EARLY CREATIVE YEARS

BATH 1801–1805

FAREWELLS AND UNCERTAINTIES

SOUTHAMPTON 1807–1809

NEW PERSPECTIVES

CHAWTON 1809–1813

A NEW AND SETTLED HOME

CHAWTON 1813–1816

YEARS OF FULFILMENT AND ACCLAIM

CHAWTON AND WINCHESTER 1816–1817

LAST DAYS

NOTE TO THIS EDITION

IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF JANE AUSTEN

INDEX OF PEOPLE AND PLACES

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

THE LETTERS OF JANE AUSTEN

In 1817, a few months after Jane Austen’s death, her brother Henry included extracts from two of her letters as a postscript to his ‘Biographical Notice of the Author’ published in the first volume of the first edition of Northanger Abbey. In 1870 her nephew, James Edward Austen-Leigh, published A Memoir of Jane Austen, enlarged and revised in the following year, and in this he included some of her letters.

Then, in 1884, Edward, Lord Brabourne published The Letters of Jane Austen in two volumes. These were letters that had been bequeathed to Lady Knatchbull (née Fanny Knight), his mother, by her great-aunt Cassandra Austen. It was to Jane’s sister Cassandra that most of the letters that survive were written.

By 1884 Jane Austen’s novels were much acclaimed. Sense and Sensibility had been published in 1811, Pride and Prejudice in 1813, Mansfield Park in 1814 and Emma in 1816; Northanger Abbey and Persuasion were published posthumously in 1818. The time had come to offer to the public ‘a picture of her such as no history written by another person could give so well,’ wrote Lord Brabourne. ‘Amid the most ordinary details and most commonplace topics, every now and then sparkle out the same wit and humour which illuminate the pages of “Pride and Prejudice”, “Mansfield Park”, “Emma”, etc., and which have endeared the name of Jane Austen to many thousands of readers in English-speaking homes.’ This is reason enough to publish a fresh selection of extracts from the letters in an easily readable edition in which relevant excerpts from the novels, together with appropriate illustrations, illuminate Jane Austen the woman and Jane Austen the author.

Painting by John Cordrey of a stage coach, early nineteenth century. These coaches were considered inappropriate for young ladies travelling alone. ‘I want to go in a stage coach, but Frank will not let me,’ Jane complained.

INTRODUCTION

On 9 January 1796 Jane Austen took up her pen to write to her elder sister Cassandra. Her twenty-year-old voice, young, confident, laughing, effortlessly crosses the distance of time lying between then and now. She expected her sister would like to know more about her flirt of the moment, and the present-day reader, already under her spell, would too. He ‘has but one fault, which time will, I trust, entirely remove – it is that his morning coat is a great deal too light.’ She was absolute master of the throwaway line, and the wicked delight she took in teasing her sister is infectious.

In 1817, on her deathbed, the by then middle-aged voice had modulated into a serene maturity, informed with endearing modesty and love. To her nephew Edward she wrote, ‘If ever you are ill, may you be as tenderly nursed as I have been, may the same blessed alleviations of anxious, sympathising friends be yours, and may you possess – as I dare say you will – the greatest blessing of all, in the consciousness of not being unworthy of their love. I could not feel this.’

The surviving, or at least known, letters of the intervening years, most of them written to Cassandra, are delightful and illuminating. They enhance the reader’s knowledge of Jane Austen, her attitudes, character, relationships; and also her external circumstances, her extended family circle, the houses in which she passed her life, the manner of that life itself. They recreate the minute fabric of such a life: money, the weather, gardening, the price of fish. All the mundane, trivial things add up to an impression of the actual, made fascinating by the genius of their author.

Drawing by Thomas Rowlandson of a grocer’s stall. Then, as now, marketing required an ability to drive a shrewd bargain, in which activity Jane seems, for the most part, to have been skilled.

‘Travelling through Kennington by Samuel Howitt. A typical eighteenth-century village scene, complete with post-chaise and carrier’s wagon. Such a sight would have been familiar to Jane Austen.

Because Cassandra and Jane were seldom, if ever, separated in their childhood and adolescence, the correspondence between them did not begin until Jane was grown up. After that they were frequently apart, and Jane dispatched journal letters to her sister almost twice a week. By then their relationship was so close and harmonious that each was almost an extension of the other. In one letter to Cassandra Jane wrote, ‘I have now attained the true art of letter-writing, which we are always told, is to express on paper exactly what one would say to the same person by word of mouth; I have been talking to you almost as fast as I could the whole of this letter’; and indeed her voice, lucid and immediate, gives the reader a beguiling illusion of privileged intimacy.

Jane Austen’s strength lay in a shrewd and piercingly accurate examination of provincial life, and her letters demonstrate how much she relished this. In Emma the heroine, watching the small happenings in the village street, reflected, ‘A mind lively and at ease, can do with seeing nothing, and can see nothing that does not answer’, and this also seems an apt comment on Emma’s creator. Although the letters were for the most part the record of seemingly unimportant details, these were transmuted by Jane’s art into something of precious worth. Sir Walter Scott described her gift as ‘that exquisite touch which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting’. Whether she was deploring the necessity of dealing with legs of mutton and doses of rhubarb, or admiring Cowper’s poems, or making sharply barbed comments on a hapless acquaintance (as, ‘Mrs. Blount . . . with the same broad face, diamond bandeau, white shoes, pink husband, and fat neck’); whether commiserating on a death or triumphantly revamping an evening cap, everything she touched acquired significance. ‘I hope George was pleased with my designs’, she wrote of a small nephew. ‘Perhaps they would have suited him as well had they been less elaborately finished; but an artist cannot do anything slovenly.’ The tone may be a laughing one, but the truth of her remark is evident throughout.

‘The Baker’, showing a baker delivering his wares in a small country village.

The particular society her letters evoke is one in which a sense of family is paramount, and indeed in the world of the letters Jane Austen was to some extent defined by family relationships: as a dutiful and loving daughter, especially close to her civilised, sympathetic father; as a dear sister to her tribe of brothers; above all, in her relationship with her beloved Cassandra. The letters served to reinforce this family closeness, as news and messages were relayed from one branch to another. ‘My brother’, she wrote to Cassandra on 11 October 1813, ‘desires his best love and thanks for all your information. Have you any idea of returning with him to Henrietta St. and finishing your visit then? Tell me your sweet little innocent ideas.’

As time passed, Jane was also shown to be an amused and interested aunt. The tone in which she wrote to her favourite nieces and her nephew Edward was markedly different from the private voice reserved for Cassandra, which spoke with such sharply focused insight, creating minutely perfected vignettes, and the famous epigrammatic characterisations. To her young relations she wrote more fluently and easily, with her own special blend of loving advice and gentle ridicule, her topics ranging from love and marriage to the craft of writing novels. Today’s reader cannot but be entranced.

The silhouette found pasted into the second edition of Mansfield Park and inscribed l’aimable Jane.

Part of the fascination of the letters lies in their power to satisfy that basic curiosity about the author of much-loved works, in order, in some sense, to possess these more fully. And indeed the correspondence does reveal much of the raw material from which the novels were fashioned. Jane’s happy letters about the promotions and successes of her sailor brothers bring to mind Fanny Prince’s delight in William’s parallel triumphs in Mansfield Park. The closeness of the bond between pairs of sisters – Elinor and Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility, or Jane and Eliza Bennet in Pride and Prejudice – lends further emphasis to the impression given by the letters of the loving concord between Cassandra and Jane herself. The lyrical description of the Dorset countryside in Persuasion stems from the same experiences as Jane’s lively letter from Lyme, with its talk of walking home in the moonlight from a ball.

Jane Austen painted by Cassandra in 1804: a work of elusive charm.

The unmarried Jane Austen’s dependent state finds echoes in the plight of the various impoverished spinsters mentioned with compassion and concern in her letters. ‘Single women have a dreadful propensity for being poor, which is one very strong argument in favour of matrimony’, she remarked in one letter. Strong, perhaps, but not sufficiently so; and in another she emphasised this. ‘Anything is to be preferred or endured rather than marrying without affection.’ She herself gave the impression of preferring a single state in a number of ways. ‘Good Mrs. Deedes!’ she remarked to her young unmarried niece, Fanny Knight, with earthy realism, ‘I hope she will get the better of this Marianne, and then I would recommend to her and Mr. D. the simple regimen of separate rooms.’

The measure of financial independence which accompanied her success as a writer was consequently all the more welcome, and enjoyed without inhibition. Writing to Fanny Knight about a possible second edition of Mansfield Park, Jane deplored that ‘People are more ready to borrow and praise, than to buy – which I cannot wonder at; but tho’ I like praise as well as anybody, I like what Edward calls Pewter too.’ By the end of her life her earnings from the novels amounted to just over six hundred and eighty pounds.

Jane Austen has sometimes been portrayed as spending her life in the provincial backwater of a country parsonage, but her correspondence shows more varied and sophisticated scenes as she moved around on visits from one country house to another, or enjoyed fashionable London parties, staying with her brother Henry and his lively wife Eliza; the latter’s cosmopolitan circle dated from her marriage to the comte de Feuillide, guillotined in 1794. The illustrations to this edition underline the variety of her experience.

John Meirs’ silhouette of Cassandra, Jane’s eldest sister, in her late 30s. ‘Take care of your precious self,’ wrote Jane, in the tender tone characteristic of their mutual devotion.

Jane Austen’s life spanned the French Revolution and on through the Napoleonic Wars, ending two years after the Battle of Waterloo. Such large events do not feature prominently in intimate domestic letters, but they are reflected in Jane’s concern for her two naval brothers, both engaged on active service with the British fleet, and also in references to the miseries of the Peninsular Campaign. ‘How horrible it is to have so many people killed’, she writes on one occasion; and later, ‘Thank Heaven! we have had no one to care for particularly among the troops.’

The novelist’s creative life falls into three more or less clearly defined periods: the happy Steventon years when she wrote the first versions of Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice; then a long time (the years of Bath and Southampton) when apparently nothing was written. This can perhaps be thought of as a period of accruing experiences and gestation of ideas. The Bath scenes for Northanger Abbey and Persuasion largely derived from that time; and similarly the Portsmouth scenes in Mansfield Park stemmed from her knowledge of Southampton naval life. Then followed the great creative period, the years at Chawton when she was once again happy and able to write, and which saw the publication of four of the six novels, and the completion of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, which would be published posthumously in 1818.

Jane’s handwriting addressing a letter to Cassandra, who was staying with her brother Henry Austen in London.

Reading the correspondence with this framework in mind gives it an extra dimension, and some of the most engaging letters are those retailing varied reactions to the novels. Jane, not surprisingly, felt partisan about these. ‘I want to tell you that I have got my own darling child from London’, she wrote on the arrival of the first copy of Pride and Prejudice; and, later in the same letter, referring to a friend, Miss Benn, to whom she had been reading the novel, ‘she really does seem to admire Elizabeth. I must say that I think her as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print, and how I shall be able to tolerate those who do not like her at least, I do not know.’

Letter to Cassandra written from Manydown. ‘Oh! dear me! I have not time or paper for half that I have to say.’

In making this selection from the letters my purpose has been to present a rounded picture of their author, showing her from as many angles as possible, in many and various moods, from the ‘light bright and sparkling’ aspect of her young womanhood, the mocking, brilliant ironic voice with the sometimes dangerously cutting edge; the generous rejoicing voice at the good fortune of others; the modesty in face of growing success; the gentle reflective voice of the last sad year, which, however, still remained capable of flashes of the famous ironic wit. Eliza Bennet’s claim to Mr. Darcy, ‘I hope I never ridicule what is wise or good. Follies and nonsense, whims and inconsistencies do divert me, I own, and I laugh at them whenever I can’, would not ring altogether convincingly if applied to the volatile Jane of the Steventon days, but seems appropriately in accord with the voice of her maturity; and this emphasises the poignant distance between the volatile girl and the calm, suffering woman.

The letters have been arranged chronologically in six sections, marking various milestones in Jane Austen’s life. These conveniently also coincide with the sequence of her different homes, beginning at Steventon Rectory in Hampshire; on to Bath on her father’s retirement; then Southampton after his death. The next two sections are devoted to the Chawton years, and the final one covers the short year of her decline, spent partly at Chawton and then in the Winchester lodgings where she died. The short extracts from the novels that punctuate the text here and there will, it is hoped, serve to highlight links between Jane’s life, letters and art.

One reward of reading these captivating letters, with their wit, warmth and poignancy, is that Jane Austen the novelist becomes also Jane Austen the woman, to be regarded not only with an endorsed admiration, but also with a sense of affectionate friendship.

PENELOPE HUGHES-HALLETT

Samuel Grimm’s watercolour of the Hampshire countryside at Selborne. An evocative reminder of the landscape so dear to Jane.

STEVENTON 1796–1801

Early Creative Years

The first twenty-five years of Jane Austen’s life were spent at Steventon Rectory, her father’s pleasant rural living in the north Hampshire countryside between Winchester and Basingstoke. Here she grew up surrounded by the affection of an exceptionally closely-knit, talented family, of which she was the seventh child and second daughter. Her sister Cassandra, nearly three years the elder of the two, was her much-loved especial confidante, and it is to her that the greater part of the correspondence is addressed. Fortunately for us, though to their mutual regret, family demands imposed frequent separations upon the sisters, and when apart they usually wrote to each other twice a week.

In 1796, the date the twenty-year-old Jane’s letters begin, her father, the Reverend George Austen, was rector of Steventon and of nearby Deane. He was tall, good-looking, with prematurely white shining curls – said to be so striking that when he removed his hat in the streets of Bath people turned to stare. He was a profound scholar, gentle and kindly, with a wry sense of humour. Jane later spoke of his ‘sweet benevolent smile’. He created an atmosphere at the Rectory of cultivated rationality which was complemented by Mrs. Austen’s qualities of sharp practicality, common sense, sparkling wit and acute perception.

Jane inherited a happy mixture of her parents’ characteristics. She was remembered by her nephew, James Austen-Leigh, as ‘tall and slender, her step light and firm . . . she had full round cheeks, with mouth and nose small and well formed, light hazel eyes, and brown hair forming natural curls close round her face.’

Jane’s first home, Steventon Rectory, drawn by her niece Anna Lefroy in 1820.

Of the Austen sons, the eldest, James, already a widower, was curate at Deane, and would many for the second time during the following year. His daughter Anna later became a great favourite with her Aunt Jane; and his son James Edward was destined to be her first biographer, helped in this task by the memories of his younger sister Caroline.

The second son, George, suffered from some disability and never lived with the family. Next came Edward, who was adopted as a boy by his cousins, the rich but childless Thomas Knights of Godmersham Park in Kent, who made him their heir. After Mr. Knight’s death and his widow’s retirement to a house in Canterbury, Edward moved into Godmersham and assumed the name of Austen Knight. His parents and sisters stayed with him there in 1798. Such visits to the great country house, with all the attendant journeyings and gaieties, were to play an important role in enriching the novelist’s experience of society. In 1796, however, Edward and his wife Elizabeth (Bridges) were still living at Rowling, a small country house near her home, Goodnestone.

Henry, reputedly Jane’s favourite brother, would become first a banker, later a parson; but at this time he was in the Oxfordshire Militia, and would shortly many his cousin Eliza de Feuillide.

Silhouette of Edward Austen being introduced by his father to Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Knight. The fortunate Edward was to receive nothing but kindness and generosity from his adoptive parents.

Francis and Charles, the two younger brothers, were in the Navy, and the next few years would see them involved in the Napoleonic Wars. News of their movements, successes and promotions was eagerly received and discussed. Their careers were distinguished, both eventually becoming admirals.

Although the light and racy tone of these early letters suggests untroubled skies, there were sorrows to contend with. The comte de Feuillide, Eliza Hancock’s first husband, had been guillotined in 1794; and, in 1797, Cassandra’s fiancé Tom Fowle died from fever in San Domingo. Cassandra never married.

By 1796, with three manuscript volumes of juvenilia to her credit, Jane was already writing novels. Elinor and Marianne, later to become Sense and Sensibility, was by now completed, possibly in epistolary form; and by August 1797 she had written First Impressions, the original of Pride and Prejudice. Mr. Austen, impressed with the novel, sent it to a publisher, who rejected it unread. Jane next began work on Susan (posthumously published as Northanger Abbey).

Detail of T. Milne’s map of Hampshire, 1791. Many of the houses marked in the Steventon neighbourhood belonged to Jane’s friends, such as those of the Lefroy, Portal and Harwood families.

The letters give a strong sense of family security and contentment. Mr. Austen read Cowper aloud in the evenings; there was much talk of dressmaking and bonnet refurbishment; Basingstoke Assemblies were enjoyed; parishioners were visited; the rectory pig was killed; weddings were discussed and births rejoiced over or deplored. Such was the fabric of Steventon life.

During the autumn of 1800 Mr. Austen suddenly decided to retire from his livings, possibly for reasons of health. Returning with her friend Martha Lloyd from a visit to the latter at Ibthorpe, Jane was abruptly greeted by Mrs. Austen: ‘Well, girls, it is all settled, we have decided to leave Steven ton and go to Bath.’ It is said that Jane fainted away in the hall at the shock of this news. The blow was a major one: to be forced to leave her beloved Steventon, the tranquil Hampshire countryside, her friends, relations and all the familiar sights of her twenty-five-year-old life; to settle in Bath, bound in by houses, town noise and tiresome provincial town society, was a terrible grief for one of her susceptibilities. In her letter of 3 January 1801 it is hard to say whether she had become reconciled to her lot, or was concealing despair behind a brilliant but brittle facade.

A view of Bath from the Bristol Road showing the city’s burgeoning terraces and crescents.

STEVENTON: SATURDAY JANUARY 9 [1796]

IN THE FIRST PLACE I hope you will live twenty-three years longer. Mr. Tom Lefroy’s birthday was yesterday, so that you are very near of an age.

After this necessary preamble I shall proceed to inform you that we had an exceeding good ball last night . . .

Miniature of Tam Lefroy. Tam and Jane flirted with one another. ‘He is a very gentlemanlike, good-looking, pleasant young man,’ Jane wrote reassuringly to Cassandra.

We were so terrible good as to take James in our carriage, though there were three of us before; but indeed he deserves encouragement for the very great improvement which has lately taken place in his dancing. Miss Heathcote is pretty, but not near so handsome as I expected. Mr. H. began with Elizabeth, and afterwards danced with her again; but they do not know how to be particular. I flatter myself, however, that they will profit by the three successive lessons which I have given them.

You scold me so much in the nice long letter which I have this moment received from you, that I am almost afraid to tell you how my Irish friend and I behaved. Imagine to yourself everything most profligate and shocking in the way of dancing and sitting down together. I can expose myself, however, only once more, because he leaves the country soon after next Friday, on which day we are to have a dance at Ashe after all. He is a very gentlemanlike, good-looking, pleasant young man, I assure you. But as to our having ever met, except at the three last balls, I cannot say much; for he is so excessively laughed at about me at Ashe, that he is ashamed of coming to Steventon, and ran away when we called on Mrs. Lefroya few days ago . . .

We had a visit yesterday morning from Mr. Benjamin Portal, whose eyes are as handsome as ever: Everybody is extremely anxious for your return, but as you cannot come home by the Ashe ball, I am glad that I have not fed them with false hopes. James danced with Alethea, and cut up the turkey last night with great perseverance . . .

‘The Five Positions of Country Dancing’ from Thomas Wilson’s An Analysis of Country Dancing, 1811 Dancing was considered something of an art. ‘We dined at Goodnestone and in the evening danced two country dances and the boulangeries,’ Jane reported to her sister.

After I had written the above, we received a visit from Mr. Tom Lefroy and his cousin George. The latter is really very well-behaved now; and as for the other, he has but one fault, which time will, I trust, entirely remove – it is that his morning coat is a great deal too light. He is a very great admirer of Tom Jones, and therefore wears the same coloured clothes, I imagine, which he did when he was wounded . . .

I condole with Miss M. on her losses and with Eliza on her gains, and am ever yours, J.A.

This is Jane’s first letter to survive, and was addressed to Kintbury in Berkshire where Cassandra was staying with her fiancé’s family, the Fowles. By now Tom Fowle had embarked on his ill-fated mission to the West Indies as private chaplain to Lord Craven. Jane refers teasingly to a flirtation with Tom Lefroy, nephew of the Lefroys of neighbouring Ashe Rectory. It is not now possible to judge the importance of this episode to Jane, although tradition in the Lefroy family has it that Tom behaved badly to her.

‘Mr. H.’ was the Reverend William Heathcote, who, in spite of not knowing ‘how to be particular’, married Elizabeth Bigg in 1798. Alethea, who danced with James, was her sister.

STEVENTON: THURSDAY JANUARY 16 [1796]

IHAVE JUST RECEIVED yours and Mary’s letter, and I thank you both, though their contents might have been more agreeable . . .

We are extremely sorry for poor Eliza’s illness. I trust, however, that she has continued to recover since you wrote, and that you will none of you be the worse for your attendance on her . . .

Our party to Ashe tomorrow night will consist of Edward Cooper, James (for a ball is nothing without him), Buller, who is now staying with us, and I. I look forward with great impatience to it, as I rather expect to receive an offer from my friend in the course of the evening. I shall refuse him, however . . .

I am very much flattered by your commendation of my last letter, for I write only for fame, and without any view to pecuniary emolument . . .

Tell Mary that I make over Mr. Heartley and all his estate to her for her sole use and benefit in future, and not only him, but all my other admirers into the bargain wherever she can find them, even the kiss which C. Powlett wanted to give me, as I mean to confine myself in future to Mr. Tom Lefroy, for whom I do not care sixpence . . .

Friday. At length the day is come on which I am to flirt my last with Tom Lefroy, and when you receive this it will be over. My tears flow as I write at the melancholy idea.

I shall be extremely impatient to hear from you again, that I may know how Eliza is, and when you are to return.

With best love, etc., I am affectionately yours, J. Austen

‘Coming Home from a Dinner Party at Night’, as depicted by Diana Sperling in 1816, a young girl who recorded her everyday impressions of Regency life. Parties were frequently planned to coincide with a full moon so as to” provide illumination for the journey home.

Edward Cooper was Mrs. Austen’s nephew. Mr. Austen had earlier augmented his income by taking in a few pupils at Steventon Rectory, one of whom had been Buller.

ROWLING: THURSDAY 15TH SEP [1796]

My dear Cassandra

WE HAVE BEEN VERY gay since I wrote last; dining at Nackington, returning by moonlight, and everything quite in style, not to mention Mr. Claringbould’s funeral which we saw go by on Sunday . . .

At Nackington we met Lady Sondes’ picture over the mantlepiece in the dining room, and the pictures of her three children in an anteroom, besides Mr. Scott, Miss Fletcher, Mr. Toke, Mr. J. Toke, and the Archdeacon Lynch. Miss Fletcher and I were very thick, but I am the thinnest of the two. She wore her purple muslin, which is pretty enough, tho’ it does not become her complexion. There are two traits in her character which are pleasing; namely, she admires Camilla, and drinks no cream in her tea . . .

We went in our two carriages to Nackington; but how we divided, I shall leave you to surmise, merely observing that as Eliz: and I were without hat or bonnet, it would not have been very convenient for us to go in the chair. We went by Bifrons, and I contemplated with a melancholy pleasure, the abode of him, on whom I once fondly doted . . .

Nackington House, the seat of Richard Milles Esq., a neighbour of the Knights at Godmersham. An engraving published in 1795.

Edward and Fly went out yesterday very early in a couple of shooting jackets, and came home like a couple of bad shots, for they killed nothing at all. They are out again today, and are not yet returned. Delightful sport! They are just come home; Edward with his two brace, Frank with his two and a half. What amiable young men!

Jane was on a visit to the Edward Austens in Kent. Nackington belonged to Richard Milles, MP for Canterbury. Bifrons was the home of Edward Taylor, ‘on whom I once fondly doted’.

‘Shooters going out in a morning’; coloured aquatint from a drawing by Samuel Howitt.

STEVENTON: SATURDAY OCT 27 [1798]

My dear Cassandra

YOUR LETTER WAS A most agreeable surprise to me today, and I have taken a long sheet of paper to show my gratitude . . .

I am very grand indeed; I had the dignity of dropping out my mother’s laudanum last night. I carry about the keys of the wine and closet, and twice since I began this letter have had orders to give in the kitchen. Our dinner was very good yesterday, and the chicken boiled perfectly tender; therefore I shall not be obliged to dismiss nanny on that account.

Mrs. Hall, of Sherborne, was brought to bed yesterday of a dead child, some weeks before she expected, owing to a fright. I suppose she happened unawares to look at her husband.